Using the Web to Rebel Against the Web

Social Media at The Pace Gallery assembles a group of artists responding to the internet, whether as a way of bringing people together, as an aesthetic influence, or as a state of affairs to regard skeptically and even satirize. Social Media takes a long view that starts in the 1960s with Robert Heinecken (the show’s one pre-internet artist), who altered magazines like Time and Mademoiselle with his own collages and put them back on supermarket racks for others to stumble on. Since Heinecken, the idea of pulling from, responding to, and feeding back into the media has become more commonplace – Twitter, Tumblr, conceptual art video games, supercuts, and super supercuts attest to the prevalence of Heinecken’s media interventionism.